th these facts well in mind, it seemed best for me to let the pictures
suffice for Tangier, and to choose for the text one road and one city. For
if the truth be told there is little more than a single path to all the
goals that the undisguised European may reach.

Morocco does not change save by compulsion, and there is no area of
European influence below Tangier. Knowing one highway well you know
something of all; consequently whether Fez, Mequinez, Wazzan, or Marrakesh
be the objective, the travel story does not vary greatly. But to-day,
Marrakusha-al-Hamra, Red Marrakesh, is the most African of all cities in
Morocco, and seemed therefore best suited to the purpose of this book.
Moreover, at the time when this journey was made, Bu Hamara was holding
the approaches to Fez, and neither Mequinez nor Wazzan was in a mood to
receive strangers.

So it falls out that the record of some two or three hundred miles of
inland travel is all that awaits the reader here. In time to come, when
Morocco has been purged of its offences of simplicity and primitiveness,
the tourist shall accomplish in forty-eight hours the journey that
demanded more than a month of last year's spring. For Sunset Land has no
railway lines, nor can it boast--beyond the narrow limits of
Tangier--telegraphs, telephones, electric light, modern hotels, or any of
the other delights upon which the pampered traveller depends. It is as a
primeval forest in the hour before the dawn. When the sun of France
penetrates pacifically to all its hidden places, the forest will wake to a
new life. Strange birds of bright plumage, called in Europe _gens
d'armes_, will displace the storks upon the battlements of its ancient
towns, the _commis voyageur_ will appear where wild boar and hyaena now
travel in comparative peace, the wild cat (_felis Throgmortonensis_) will
arise from all mineralised districts. Arab and Berber will disappear
slowly from the Moroccan forest as the lions have done before them, and in
the place of their _douars_ and _ksor_ there shall be a multitude of small
towns laid out with mathematical precision, reached by rail, afflicted
with modern improvements, and partly filled with Frenchmen who strive to
drown in the cafe their sorrow at being so far away from home. The real
Morocco is so lacking in all the conveniences that would commend it to
wealthy travellers that the writer feels some apology is due for the
appearance of his short story of an almost u